In an interview on The Polar Regions

And the Stephen J. Pyne book?

The Ice is non-fiction and it’s all about different kinds of ice in the Arctic! It is informative is what I’d say about this book. It is a huge book by a scientist and it was the hardest one to pick. But it is an extraordinary thing, ice. It’s not one thing, there are all different kinds and Pyne is drawn into its complexity.

Art and science are drawn together too and I find that interesting. Art and science really are drawn together in the Polar regions and it was there that I found there is more similarity between the two than people tend to think. The book is about how ice is formed but he draws in an artistic vision to complete his picture. It is an apocalyptic book about how much ice there is, or how little, and how important it is for us to have a relationship with it beyond ice-cubes in the ice-tray. It’s not full of pictures – he makes the words do it, which I love. I didn’t use pictures in my Antarctica book. There are lots of lovely coffee table books about the Polar regions but people can find those easily and I’m not really interested in them. I want to show people the Polar regions in words, from the perspective of words.

You don’t mention animals much.

I suppose that reflects the fact that I’m not particularly interested in animals. Penguins come into the Cherry book and he talks a lot about penguins and how fearless they are. They have no land-based predators so they are fearless and perhaps that’s how things were with animals before we started killing them. You get fed up with penguins before they get fed up with you.